LomoPeople: Svala

It was one day in August that fate would play an unexpected turn. She came out of nowhere bedecked in a bowler hat and full of enthusiasm for her newly adopted city of London. She changed everything. She taught me about a whole range of new and delicious things that life had to offer. One of them, Lomography, really stuck. The other: Communism, unexpectedly grew.

She taught me to look upon a city I had grown tired of with fresh eyes. She had no fear, and most of all, she accommodated my all-too-British sensitivities and try-hard attempts at humour. She would laugh even when what poured out of my mouth wasn’t funny (she’s a bit more reluctant these days). Eventually she lent me her hammer and sickle and thenceforth I went, working for the state.

I could go on like this, all sugary and sweet about a girl whose shoes act as a good starting point for conversations with strangers. But I’ll stop. Instead I’ll just thank random events and the people who surround them. Their portraits hang proudly in my house and every morning I salute them.

She got a job in the Lomography store London. From there her enthusiasm and love for analogue life passed over to me. Like a nation falling like a domino to the sway of socialism I was soon adopting her ways. Her measured use of a Fisheye, her tight control of her Lubitel – I tried in vain to emulate her actions, always falling short at the last hurdle.

The Diana F+ was the exploding cigar in our relationship. She proudly presented one to me on my birthday and we’ve been a neat little pair ever since. Think Trotsky and Lenin, back in the harmonious days when everything and everyone down with the revolution was cool. That’s the Diana and I of today.

The buck didn’t stop there. We went on to own a LOMO LC-A, evenly distributing its ownership half and half among ourselves. We bought a Colorsplash Flash and laughed at all the photographic subjects who fell in our wake.

But, alas dear readers, for today I write on a rather more somber note. Yes, she still continues to be the object of my desires, my mentor and my luscious assassin, however recently she has been calling for division between analogue and digital worlds.

Only yesterday she purchased a Pentax and began calling for a great wall to be constructed between London separating those in support of analogue from those on the flashy digital side (alas, for they know not their fickle ways). Her rhetoric is beginning to concern me. What will this do to the glorious panoramas my Spinner 360 has revealed?

Before things end up turning sour, I want to say thanks to her. She not only showed me love but she also spurred a revolution in me.

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